Hello all. Less than 24 hours ago I ran into tradegy. One site I used to use a lot for file hosting seemed to have gone through some changes, and my system was trying to download some new codec or something as some sort of advertisement. Well, it really doesn't matter what was going on, the point is that despite a few years of this trusted host, management changed some things, and the next thing I knew was I had a virus.

It was Vista Center 2011, or whatever it was called. It was sending me fake messages about needing to download something else in order to repair files, and of course it would block firefox and IE from loading.

I ended up rebooting a few times in order to try and get to safe mode, and this is where my hell started.

Basically, if I boot up to safemode now, all I get is a black screen, saying safe-mode but I can't really see any desktop or icons or anything.

Also, if I boot up normally, I just get a blue background with a window that says Vista OS Recovery (or something similar). There are options for doing a system restore etc (no, I can't do a system restore). I decided to try the first option which is a repair tool thing. Unfortunately when it runs it tells me it is not adequate enough to do a fix.

The only thing on that list which I CAN DO, is get a dos prompt if I want.

There is no driver CD or anything that came with my system, and that annoys me, because now I have no Vista CD or anything here (why do companies do that!).

I don't know what else to do now from here. Isn't there some sort of download CD that can let me boot up to my vista hard drive or something? If even safe-mode doesn't properly work, I guess I'm sunk?

Alright, time to re-clarify since it's a bite late and I'm tired (so not be making as much sense).

Even when I hold down F8 and go into safe-mode, the only thing that comes up is the System Recovery Options window. Unfortunately, everytime I try to run that, I just get some errors (most of them unknown).

An example of what I get that are NOT unknown errors are:

Problem Event Name: StartupRepairV2
Problem Signature: SystemDisk
6.0.6000.16386.0.0.0.0
0
65536


I feel I am out of options at this point. Any ideas?

I've done some more extensive reading tonight. It seems HP does have a version of the recovery disk available. The problem is, there already is a recovery partition installed on my box, and obviously THAT is not working. So what reason would there be for the disc to be any different?

Furthermore, just to ship the disc to me will come with a 50$ shipping charge, LOL. These guys are such crooks.... And even then there are no promises what-so-ever this would help my situation in any way.

It's three days old, sadly.

A free bootable a/v disc would very likely have fixed the issue.

Avira AntiVir Rescue System - Download

Grr. My road of hell refuses to end.

I finally gave up, and decided to install Windows7 for the first time, just to have something that works. And even THAT doesn't seem to work now. Spent hours with a tech guy trying to get my dsl working, but no go. They believe it is a problem now with windows7 not running well with my Nvidea nForce network controller.

Just great... why the hell is everything so complicated here?

Now I got another interesting problem. My system refuses to boot up to Win7, unless my Win7 CD is in the drive. Even if I don't hit any key to boot from the CD, windows seems to need that CD in the drive just to find the Win7 OS.

Not sure what is going on there.